Trail Of Tears: Discrimination Against African Americans

As if this discrimination against African Americans was not bad enough, there are many other races that, throughout the history of America, have been discriminated upon. One of the most important being the Native Americans, which people today never seem to discuss. This discrimination, first originated, when Spain first began their colonization of America. When the first Spanish explorers came to America, they found the Native Americans were sitting on a huge amount of natural resources but were not taking advantage of it. They refused to take from these resource because they believed that the spirit of their god was in everything including inanimate objects, therefore, they believed that they could only take as much as they needed from …show more content…
The people did not give up on this quest for land and instead made an even bigger problem out of it. Andrew Jackson, looking to give the people what they wanted, decided to issue the Native Americans to leave their territory anyways, thus resulting in one of the greatest American tragedies, the Trail of Tears, in which tens of thousands of Native Americans were killed on their journey to the west ("Trail of Tears.”). Many American people look at this today and do not truly consider how devastating this was. Americans today make up excuses such as “that would never happen today” or “I did not take part in it”, thinking this somehow justifies the fact that it happened. However, it is this ignorant mindset that continues to develop racial inequality today. If we refuse to look back at the problems that we had in the past, we are destined to make them again in the future ("The Trail of Tears: They Knew It Was Wrong.”). This problem was developed by overgeneralization and stereotypes that were developed by the previous conflicts of war, which is very similar to African American inequality and to many unequal race issues that continue today. For proof that this can still occur in todays society, we need to look back no further than sixty years ago, during the second World …show more content…
There was no evidence to suggest that these people had done anything wrong, and the only reasoning was due to a racial prejudice. These Japanese often tried to fight this discrimination. One specific case made it to the supreme court, known as Korematsu v. The United States. The supreme court concluded that this was a necessity during wartime, therefore justifying their actions. This court result is completely unfair and discriminatory in itself. It is completely unjustified by any standard to decide that a group of people with similar appearances should suffer for the wrong doings of one specific organization of that race (“Korematsu v. United States.”). Because of this overgeneralization, many fellow Americans lives were completely ruined. And, similarly to the discrimination against African Americans and Native Americans, we continue to pretend as though this never happened. Yet this discrimination against Japanese continued past internment. Many Americans were infuriated by the ending of Japanese internment even after the ending of the war, wishing they would just go away. Even today, people continue to think of the Japanese race, as a whole, to be the ones that bombed pearl harbor ("Japanese-American Internment.”). Because of this overgeneralized discrimination, we are not treating these races with the proper liberties that are granted to them by the Thirteenth,